ST4 has slowed down the VSCode tide, here is the nail in the coffin

[Afrowave]

Hello Sublime Text Fanatics, (@OdatNurd, I just had to ),

My colleague uses VS Code and could not understand why I paid for both ST and SM. He was always telling me how VS Code could do all that and more.

You see, I believe that if you want to set yourself up with the best, say, audio system, you should buy the units from the best brands at the budget you have. Do not buy a single brand “audio-centre” with average components. You will not be happy in the long run.

So for my dev environment, I have ST/SM with Terminus and iTerm/Warp on the outside with Docker Desktop / minikube for container dev. He thinks its too much. He says, I should VS Code and the VS Code marketplace. Yeah, right.

So finally the “free lunch” on VS Code is coming to an end. He sent me a link - VS Code - Fractured by Design..

I thought that was very kind of him and I wanted to extend the kindness to my fellow ST fanatics who need something to quieten the constant hum in the background.

[reagle]

A good article about risks of MS dependencies even when they appear “open” (the old embrace and extend paradigm for the 21st century). But I don’t see how it’s salient to ST4. ST is proprietary by definition; it’s its own little fragmented shard that no one is building a platform on anyway.

From the perspective of an individual user, I still use ST, but the developers’ focus is elsewhere, and many of the best plug-ins were developed over 10 years ago and haven’t been updated since. That’s not enough to stem the VSCode tide, to say nothing of sealing a coffin.

[Mrwilson1]

I wish ST would create plugins for themselves like Atom did. However like you say there may not be an interest for it at Sublime HQ

[juanfal]

I’ve used ST since it was created, but before that I used to use TextMate and before that I used Alpha. I use plain text editors for more than source code editing. I use them for everything. If someone said I should use a huge and complex and Microsoft dependant (!) text editor, sorry, I’d think they are lost in the hype

[Lozminda]

I need a break so I’ll go off piste…

Have been using MS Azure, which isn’t bad. Well it has to be good otherwise it’s completely doomed to failure and it’s good coz they’ve ‘bought’ linux and learnt lessons from it and all the other OpenS stuff. They’ve prob put all their best folks on it too, leaving the less good folks on other MS products, which shall I say aren’t quite as good as MS make out (er hem). MS Office & Edge have got to be two of the worst bits of software I’ve ever had the displeasure of using. VSCode is somewhere in the middle.

It’s a shame that ST3-> ST4 forced conversion is still plaguing me, otherwise it’d be:

00001 : MS (1 for Azure, though the concept is terrifying, you won’t own anything folks !)

Infinity : Small Independent Teams, instead that score is just quite large. (ie much better than 1)

It’s late, I’m waffling (currently debugging buildozer builds so madness is near)

[OdatNurd]

It’s a shame that ST3-> ST4 forced conversion is still plaguing me

Why don’t you just uninstall ST4, reinstall ST3 and set update_check to false in your preferences to stop it from trying to upgrade?

[Afrowave]

You make a good point @reagle.

To be transparent, I was looking at how many topics have been generated about migration to VSCode after ST4 was released. They completely disappeared.

In fact, this one might be the first one this year. Hence my rather sensational topic header and intro.

[bitsper2nd]

I’m one of that believes that the fracture creates opportunity. Yes, Microsoft wants users on its ecosystem, but at the same time many of the tools they built with open-source have enabled others to make alternatives and even stay relevant. Gitpod, OpenVSX, VS Codium, language servers are great examples.

The article mentions pylance as a proprietary language server. The problem is not that it is closed source, the problem is that the license very restrictive and can’t be used on other editors except VS Code.

Vim, emacs, and Sublime Text users will simply keep using the free and opensource language server for python like pyright or pylsp. If anything Microsoft has made it possible for Sublime Text to remain competitive with language servers.

As for the other example about CodeSpaces. Yes Microsoft has the advatange here and pretty much prefers using that over Gitpod. But opportunity gives Gitpod a reason to exist as long as there is a market for individuals and companies that do not want to be tied to Microsoft.

[Lozminda]

Because that doesn’t work if you don’t have a license…Unless there’s been a change I don’t know about.

[OdatNurd]

It hasn’t, no; the ability to control what version you’re running is exclusive to licensed users. There’s not really any point in SublimeHQ making it easy to people to trial ST3 since it’s not going to receive any future updates, so the chances of anyone deciding to purchase it are probably fairly low.

[jfcherng]

Fwiw, my ST 4 license works on ST 3211 too.